All Grown Up
by Touki Yume
Summary: The Host Club is all grown up... sort of. At least, they're all in college or grad school. A chance happening reunites old friends who have all matured a little, changed a little. Will the old relationships also mature a little, change a little?


**Author's rambles**

Well, I haven't written fanfiction in ages, but OHSHC presented such an opportunity – all those intriguing characters – that I couldn't resist. This is the spawn of a whimsical idea that came to mind; it'll be a fairly large story if I actually continue to work on it. I'm just testing the waters with this to see if anyone's interested.

**Notes on the story**

I make some references in here that you may or may not get, so at this point I'll explain. It's not that crucial that you know this stuff but it helps.

MIT: okay, you should know what this is. One of the top science universities in the world.

University of Pennsylvania: UPenn is an Ivy League school and, consequently, one of the best universities in the U.S.

Wharton: The Wharton School at UPenn is a top-notch business school, supposedly better than anything else anywhere else.

MBA: This is the degree business students get in graduate school.

**Prologue**

_Examples of How Haruhi Fujioka is Very Lucky_

Her friends liked to comment, with varying degrees of envy and admiration, that rare and wonderful things tended to fall into Haruhi Fujioka's lap.

This Haruhi Fujioka did, indeed, have that most basic of what girls will consider worth envying in another girl, for Haruhi Fujioka was rather attractive. She was not so attractive that she could turn heads, but she was definitely pretty enough to give strangers the sensation that they were missing out on a great deal in life by not becoming acquainted with this pale, wide-eyed young lady with a little-girl smile and hair the color exotic chocolate.

Beyond this fundamental – but nevertheless exceedingly important – quality, which, however coveted, is still bestowed with some generosity upon the female population, such an immense number of good things did indeed happen into Haruhi Fujioka's life that one who knew her was, in fact, highly tempted to believe this girl had bribed Fortune with her soul, or perhaps an endless supply instant coffee, or something else similarly enticing.

For one, despite being rather pretty, Haruhi Fujioka was also rather intelligent. This was partly due to faithful study, but even the most faithful of scholars cannot achieve much truly worth noting if he (or she) is not inherently bright. Haruhi Fujioka was perhaps not quite a genius, but she was certainly, to some significant extent, inherently bright.

This intrinsic astuteness of mind had given her a great many opportunities by which Haruhi Fujioka made her lap a convenient place for many more good things to fall into. In middle school it had naturally brought her to the top of the class, which put her into good graces with her teachers and classmates such that there was not a single person in the entire school who had a bad opinion of her. Many of the boys, in fact, had had very positive opinions of her. Positive enough for them to believe themselves in love.

After middle school she had been smart enough – or lucky enough, or more likely both – to test into Ouran Academy, on full scholarship. And then came what most girls would consider the windfall of her life, although Haruhi Fujioka herself considered it mostly a pleasant coincidence. By nothing more than sheer clumsiness, she contracted herself an eight-million-yen debt, with the negligible side benefit of a more-or-less lifelong friendship with six unusually handsome and kind-hearted boys. Well, they had been boys then. A couple more years of living, laughing, and loving made it slightly more plausible to call them "men".

And after high school Haruhi Fujioka's brains, good fortune, and most likely her pretty face as well – for there had been a number of interviews invovled – won her a scholarship to study abroad in the United States for her entire undergraduate education. So she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – that internationally-renowned New England haven for the incredibly smart and usually nerdy – and began studying molecular biology.

While doing a research project the summer after her junior year, she happened to become completely engrossed in the study. Thus intrigued by her discoveries on those little nucleotide coils in which the entirety of our heritage and being are supposedly stored, Haruhi Fujioka figured she may as well report her findings in the manner of a scientific paper. The professor (who happened to be a leading scientist) mentoring her research submitted the paper, with her confused assent, to a scientific journal. Perhaps her paper was really quite good, or perhaps the editor of the journal had gotten a girlfriend the previous night and was therefore in a splendid mood when he read her work. In any case, the paper was published. The journal it was published in happened to be a very widely-read periodical, and a great many of the glasses-wearing gray-haired leading scientists who read the journal were very impressed with the research by that MIT undergrad Haruhi Fujioka.

Thus it happened that during the spring semester of her senior year, Haruhi Fujioka received an email from her research mentor. There was no subject. She opened the email; it read: _They like your research. You're nominated for the National Rising Scientist Award._

Her reply consisted of three words and three punctuation marks: _Cool. What's that?_

Two hours later her mentor sent his simple answer: _A great honor._

That night Ashley Dennecke, her freshman year roommate and best friend thereafter, explained to her that it was the most prestigious title awarded to students of the sciences. Haruhi Fujioka was, apparently, the first undergrad nominee since 1988 (generally only graduate students were nominated). If she won she would be the first undergrad winner since 1972.

"Oh," said Haruhi, upon learning this. She didn't quite understand the scale of her accomplishment – she had, after all, only been curious. That was why she'd gone so in-depth with the research. Sure, she'd lost a lot of sleep and missed a lot of meals – but that was only because she was the sort of person who tended to forget about those things when she was truly fascinated. It really wasn't that big of a deal, this National Rising Scientist thing – right?

* * *

The day after Haruhi Fujioka's two exchanges with her mentor and her friend regarding the National Rising Scientist Award, another Japanese student studying at another world-renowned university in the American Northeast was sipping an espresso at a café when a local newspaper left on the table by a previous customer caught his eye. Or rather, his eye was so unamused by everything else it saw that it was forced to notice the little newspaper. He scanned the headline. _MIT senior nominated for National Rising Scientist Award._

This young man scoffed. _MIT_, he thought disdainfully, mentally rolling his eyes. Eye-rolling was something he preferred not to do physically. _That lot of nerds… only losers like Haruhi would squander a full scholarship to any university in the United States to go to a place like that._ While musing this, his eyes continued to listlessly roam over the article. _DNA… revolutionary concept… earth-shattering discovery… first undergrad since 1988… _Admittedly, he harbored some curiosity over the identity of this apparently brilliant person. He scanned the article for capital letters – a name, please? This young man was unusually adept at glossing over documents for information, and thus he found the name with ease. Haruhi Fujioka.

_Oh_, he thought. _Well.

* * *

_

Later that spring, Haruhi Fujioka received another subject-less email from her mentor. Three words, one punctuation mark: _You got it_. A "congratulations" was not necessary – there would be plenty from the rest of the world, and as for the one from him, well, that was implied. Her reply was slightly less passive than the earlier one: _Wow. Thank you._

To Ashley Dennecke she relayed the news more or less as her mentor had passed it on to her. "Hey, Ashley."

"What's up?"

"I got it."

"Got what?"

She looked pointfully at her friend and smiled the little-girl-on-Christmas-morning smile.

Ashley understood. "Oh. Oh my God." And then she screamed shrilly. "Omigod, Haruhi! _Holy crap._"

Only the wide grin on Haruhi's face revealed how extremely happy she actually was. She had grown more subtle with age.

* * *

That same day, the aforementioned male, MIT-disliking, Japanese student was walking down the halls of the University of Pennsylvania to his Global Strategic Management class with a friend when the friend brought up a topic not usually discussed by MBA students.

"You know that National Rising Scientist Award thing?" the friend asked. "It's supposed to be huge in the science world."

"Vaguely," he replied.

"There was some fuss earlier this year because some chick from MIT got nominated."

"Yes."

"Yeah, well, turns out she got it. My brother's in engineering, you know; he's totally freaking out. Practically wants to marry her."

"Oh. Well. That's interesting."

This student then did some research on the Internet to confirm the fact.

* * *

Around 10 P.M. that evening, Haruhi Fujioka got an email from someone who usually did not send her emails.

_Haruhi –_

_I heard about your luck with the NRSA. Congratulations. It's an unexpectedly big deal; even people at Wharton are talking about it. Possibly because you are an undergrad, and have a considerably obscure background. Well, I'll be in Cambridge this weekend to talk to some professors at Harvard. Shall we have some sushi for lunch?_

_Kyouya.

* * *

_

**More author's rambles**

Rather short. I'd planned for this chapter to be longer but that seemed like a lovely place to stop, so I stopped. You should note that _the NRSA does not exist. It is something I made up_. What do you think? Potential?

And as for the pairings… all I can say is, keep an open mind.


End file.
